Paley and Lowe Gallery

The posthumous show of drawings by Turku Trajan is a tribute to an artist who was half-sanctified into an archetype after his death, when his life was reviewed in terms of a nineteenth-century Parisian bohème of poverty and neglect. Such an attitude unfortunately merely sentimentalizes and idealizes the artist as an elitist requiring special care and attention. It is obvious that the art world is run as a free market economy and that commercial, and thereby further, recognition is largely based on financial considerations, competitive politics, and individualistic exercise of power. To deplore this situation is to rant against the inherent contradiction in the role of the professional artist, who may or may not have a specific audience in mind, but whose commercial and professional audience is probably not the one he is working for.